Jan. 7, 2005

Not An Island Upon the Land
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     People have often asked me over the years why a newspaper like this, published in a small town like San Pedro, should be concerned with events beyond the sleepy neighborhood issues of dog parks and CRA development projects. “Why is it,” they ask, “do I waste time and space bashing the President or the Governor, or covering the war in Iraq or the dozens of other issues” that appear in this most local of publications?
     The answer is quite simple. Just drive up to the lookout on Gaffey Street by the Korean Bell and see for yourself the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean with its steady stream of vessels arriving from all points of the compass and berthing in the largest industrial port complex in North America. We are surrounded by some sixteen oil refineries and connected to a lattice of transportation arteries that connects this place to everywhere else by land.
     The sense of isolation that this place has comes as much from its history as it does its distance from the political core of LA-centric power. Yet, even as the distance to City Hall has diminished recently, with the empowerment of citizen advisory councils and the election of Mayor Hahn from San Pedro, the rest of the world remains remote for many. Many local residents are still not clear about the position that they are in—being as they are on the door step of both the global and national economies. World and national affairs can and do have immense impacts on local issues, such as transportation gridlock, air pollution and labor.
     Even as the ripples of the tsunami from the Indian Ocean reach the shores of our collective consciousness, so too do the waves of the global economy splash on our daily lives in ways most obvious and subtle. One of these other ripples that hit our shoreline over the recent holidays was the filing of a $400 million lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles by the notorious LAXT (petroleum coke terminal) and Oxbow Carbon and Minerals, one of its shareholders. Naming specifically our Councilwoman Janice Hahn, accusing her of a “gross breach of fiduciary duty” and of leading the charge to destroy their business.
     It is not clear as yet whether this is just a ploy by LAXT/Oxbow to wiggle their way out of paying the $23 million in back rent owed to the Port, or if this is just another corporate strong-arm tactic to muscle the public coffers to compensate for their own bad business decisions. If there is anybody who should be sued, it would seem to me that it should be the former Mayor Dick Riordan and former 15th Councilman Rudy Svorinich, Jr. for backing this stupid $210 million investment with public support and POLA investment. And it should be the public suing to get their investment back.
     The funny thing about the global-free-marketeers like Oxbow et al is that they want all the advantages and profits of working in the free market, and none of the costs when things start to go south… or, as in this case, east. Not long after the grand gala opening of the LAXT, China opened up its own cheaper sources of coal for the Asian export market. One only has to open up the daily newspapers to read about the frequent mining disasters there to understand how the Chinese keep their prices so low– at the expense of the lives of their workers—the same way that Rockefeller used to at his Ludlow, Colorado mine, and elsewhere a century ago. Even more so, the LAXT group should have seen the competition coming when their chief engineer Lou Romel left to work on a competing facility in Australia, which is half the globe closer to the East Pacific steal manufacturers.
     It was obvious to us from the beginning that the LAXT facility was a flawed concept on a number of levels, and this newspaper spent more that two years convincing both the public and the government agencies like the AQMD that represent them just how flawed it was environmentally. This new lawsuit against the city now only explains how flawed it was financially. The bottom line here is that if LAXT/Oxbow were willing to take the risk initially, they must now be willing to take the loss and not make up for it at the public’s expense.